If you are going to tell people the truth, be funny or they will kill you.

Monday, March 23, 2009

Old Sperm Makes For Dumb Kids

I always thought there might be a scientific reason for the trend of older women having sex with younger men - the so-called "cougar" phenomena.

Turns out there is some clinical evidence to support a theory that it's not just about ear hair and prostate trouble. Thank you, science!

The journal PLoS Medicine analyzed data from a study of over 50,000 pregnant women and decided that the information suggested that older dads make dumber kids, and the older the baby-daddy, the less-smart the offspring. The study called out specific areas of increased dimness, such as “thinking and reasoning, concentration, memory, understanding, speaking, and reading.”

Conversely, older women tend to spawn smarter, which the study suggests could be due to social factors like more experience, better nurturing environment, higher income, and more education in older women.

I'm trying to understand why for women it's social reasons and for men, it appears to be biological. That seems a bit unfair. Perhaps if men had the ability to take their boys out and be all social, we could close the gap, but that's typically frowned on by society. Perhaps there's some experimental bias at work here.

Maybe a lot of women scientists were behind the study and skewed the results, because deep down, they don't want to have sex with old men. It could happen.